Monthly Archives: July 2008

Marcella and I will be doing a workshop in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the Vietnam Cinema Department, for 6 days, August 18-24. The following week we’ll travel a bit, to Hue and Ho Chi Minh City.

Here’s an update on coming October trip:

Oct. 17, Friday, Ross Media Center, UN-L, Lincoln, NE.

Screening of PARABLE (73 mins), and probably also AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD (23′), plus unfinished version of SWIMMING IN NEBRASKA (will have 40-50 mins). All works were shot in/around Lincoln while on an artist’s residency 2006-7. In evening.

Oct. 19, Sunday, Facets Multi-Media, Chicago IL.

Screening OVER HERE (76 mins) and some other short works. Afternoon-evening.

Oct. 22, Wednesday, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ.

Morning talk, showing various clips of past work, from very early to most recent.

As I reported from Jeonju, I saw some good “indie” films, among them BALLAST. It was a very nice film, which still is vivid for me. At the time I saw it the filmmaker, Lance Hammer, whom I met there, said he’d be giving a go at self-distribution, despite good notices from Sundance etc. It’ll open soon at the Film Forum in NYC, which, sadly, is probably a kiss of death.

Here’s an NYT article on DIY distribution, or more about the collapse of any kind of meaningful “indie” distribution in the US (and most other places too). Of course one might make a long essay about how curious it is that as means of delivery/distribution multiply, rather than getting a wider range, capitalism clamps down and you can watch Batman XX , or some other bloated Hwd film, but, god forbid, a foreign one, or an indie that doesn’t have stars, well fukdatman. Of the films mentioned in this article most sound accessible, even “easy,” but most likely they’ll get their week or two in marginal cinemas, an audience of 10 or 50 thousand, and the makers won’t see a dime, even after all their DIY distribution work. Long gone are the days when your quirky (but easy to take) indie film might pick up a Miramax 3 million deal.

So if you’re looking to get rich making your little indie film, dream on. On the other hand, if you can psyche yourself up for the coming depression (of among other things, your income), you might consider the route I took: modest little films that cost $100 or $1000 or even $2000, no pay, and if you luck out, you get in a handful of festivals, one of which might fly you to where ever and put you up 3 nights, from which if you are fantastically lucky you might pick up some kind of TV sale where you will actually see a little money, and then you can peddle DVDs and pick up anything from a few thousand to maybe 20K. Doesn’t exactly sound like a living. Unless, perhaps, you have ten of these over time, and you are frugal, etc.

Today I got a note from Australia letting me know that All the Vermeers, Sure Fire, and Speaking Directly can all be seen on the net. I suspect there’s others too. Of course I don’t get a penny….

Instead she commits crimes for Karl Rove and George Bush while working in the “Justice Department.” Her job was to weed out any libruls, however qualified for the public jobs as prosecutors, etc., and insert instead reliable trustworthy, if legally incompetent or totally unqualified, Federalist Society “conservatives.” In this context “conservative” might be more properly translated as “authoritarian fascist with a so-called Christian veneer,” and naturally, “a Bushie.”

Not long ago we had a President impeached for lying (he did lie) about getting a BJ from another little Monica. However, these not so many years later our Congress trembles to initiate impeachment for a very long laundry list of far graver lies and crimes, among them this little Monica’s participation in the illegal corruption of Alberto Gonzale’s Department of (so-called) Justice.

And thus did America’s experiment in democracy go flushing down the toilet, bought by the highest bidders (oil, pharm, military-industrial complex) and the servile salesmen of Congress all too eager to cash in on their crumbs off the table.

Well this looks like an old studio set. Can anyone tell me if they’ve seen one of these guys films or not? I vaguely remember reading something about them a while ago, but then blank. Here’s article from NYT.

When we look in the mirror, our relative beauty is not the only thing we misjudge. In a series of studies, Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues have interviewed scores of people about what they think the mirror shows them. They have asked questions like, Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

People overwhelmingly give the same answers. To the first question they say, well, the outline of my face on the mirror would be pretty much the size of my face. As for the second question, that’s obvious: if I move away from the mirror, the size of my image will shrink with each step.

Both answers, it turns out, are wrong. Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly, this half-size rule does not apply to the image of someone else moving about the room. If you sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches or moves away, the size of the person’s image in the mirror will grow or shrink as our innate sense says it should.

Shifting over from http://www.cinemaelectronica.com, forum which had a nice run of 8 or so years, thought to skip the $250 a year fee for something that seems to have devolved into a kind of blog, and do it here instead. So, welcome to a new leaf in cinemaelectronica, where I’ll post things on arts, culture, politics, empire and whatever, and where I welcome a conversation, so please use the comments section.

So to kick things off here, I thought the above combo found in today’s newspaper offered a succinct view of America in the Time of Bush.